This May Day, let’s hope democratic socialism makes a comeback
In recent decades, socialism has been challenged from all directions. The influential German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf was right when he wrote that Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of “liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was “a caricature of a serious argument”, but he agreed with its core premise: “socialism is dead, and none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double nightmare of Stalinism and Brezhnevism.” From the left, Andre Gorz echoed that sentiment: “As a system, socialism is dead. As a movement and an organized political force, it is on its last legs. All the goals it once proclaimed are out of date.”
Gorz’s frustrations were directed at the workers’ movement as a whole. It hadn’t fulfilled its revolutionary destiny, though socialists were still wedded to it and its failures. Capitalism has proved remarkably durable. But from a different perspective, the history of working-class politics since the days of Marx and Engels has been a stunning success. God rested on the seventh day; the labor movement gave us the sixth off. We went from an era when capital ruled unchallenged to one with powerful limits on its conduct – the 40-hour week, labor and environmental regulations and more. These reforms, and the broader progress on women’s liberation and racial equality, are under constant siege, but they happened.
We do not live in the worst of all possible words. The world we live in, as brutal and unequal as it is, has been made more humane by conscious class movements. That consolation seems like a small one, however, given how lofty our ambitions once were. Many would agree that socialists have always understood how capitalism works and even proved capable of reforming some of its ugliest features. But why, many ask, would we repeat the disasters of the 20th century by once again trying to create a socialist system?
The first reason is that the tremendous suffering in the world today demands a response. Capitalist development
has created mass abundance, but it hasn’t met the basic needs of the most vulnerable. Millions still die every year of preventable diseases. Many more spend their lives mired in poverty. The second answer is ideological: capitalism is built off wage labor, which rests on the exploitation and domination of humans by other humans. Democratic workplaces embedded in an economy committed to the moral worth and flourishing of all could make this subordination no longer necessary.
A third answer: even if we’re content to simply reform capitalism, those reforms will be continually undermined by capital’s structural power. Capital figured out how to live with generous welfare states, but once its profits were threatened those social guarantees were the first to go. Left governments and labor, on the other hand, knew they were dependent on thriving corporations to fund whatever programs were left and were forced to concede to their undemocratic demands. Addressing that power imbalance will mean pressing on to democratic socialism, a kind of society where worker-controlled firms with interests reconciled to that of society as a whole run the productive economy.
And finally, there’s the climate crisis and the real possibility that capitalism could destroy civilization as we know it. We’re on pace for over 3C (5.4F) of warming above preindustrial levels, even if existing international climate pledges are upheld. We probably need to keep that number below 1.5C to prevent deep economic recession, massive crop failure and the irreversible decline of ice sheets. That suggests we are fated to undergo the catastrophe so many now predict.
The intensification of this crisis will be the test by which future generations judge us, much as we look back to the action (or lack thereof) taken against fascism in the 1920s and 30s. As global warming intensifies, we’ll probably see massive refugee flows, economic destabilization and the elevation of vicious new rightwing movements. Far from trying to push beyond capitalism to a new stage of civilization, we might find ourselves looking back with nostalgia at our far from ideal present.
Fighting climate change can’t wait until “after the revolution”, and we’ll have to find a way to shape capitalist investment priorities and win sweeping reforms in the here and now. Yet it would be politically counterproductive and morally unconscionable if the “greening” of capitalism is merely used as a tool for austerity in the north or to deny those in the global south muchneeded development. Still, we need to understand the complexity of nature and the unintended consequences of certain attempts to “master” it. Capital seeks to infinitely expand, but the material world – both human labor and the material environment – has finite limits. In his day, Karl Marx hailed reforms such as the Ten Hours Act as a triumph of “the political economy of the working class” because it limited the scope of capitalist exploitation over workers. We need to radically impose new limits on the ability of capital to exploit the environment.
Of course, states that called themselves socialist like the Soviet Union and China under Mao were hardly paragons of environmentalism. In their rush to catch up with capitalist rivals, industrialization poisoned landscapes for generations. There was little environmental oversight by state planners and managers as they tried to expand production.
There are reasons to believe that a democratic socialism would do far better at keeping humanity flourishing along with the wider ecology in which we’re enmeshed. Worker-controlled firms don’t have the same “grow or die” imperative as capitalist ones. A more empowered citizenry, too, would be better able to weigh the costs and benefits of new development. At the very least, more democracy means a better chance to argue for a politics that defends the interests of our children and grandchildren.
The final answer to “Why socialism?” is simple: it would be the best guarantor of peace. If you were alive a few hundred years ago, a lord might have summoned you and other peasants, given you pikes, and told you that you had to go to war with people in a neighboring village. You rallied under a blue banner with a griffin or some such creature on it; they rallied under a green banner with a dragon on it. In battle, you piked some poor soul or got piked yourself. One day, people will look upon the division of this tiny world into rival nations and armies with the same dismay that characterizes our reactions to premodern history. The flags of countries might not be replaced by red ones overnight, and we might not all one day sing The Internationale in Esperanto, but the internationalist appeal of socialism will be a far more potent challenge to nationalism than liberal cosmopolitanism.
Socialism has survived a lot over the past century. It’s survived persecution from tyrants and the tyrants that it itself gave birth to. It survived the radical reshaping of capitalism and that of its great protagonist, the working class.
But does socialism really have a future? I have the utmost moral confidence that a world in which some thrive by depriving others of freedom, billions needlessly suffer amid plenty, and we move ever closer to ecological catastrophe is unacceptable. I also believe that as long as we live in a society divided into classes, there will be natural opposition to inequality and exploitation. Technical and political barriers to progress can’t be underestimated, but if we are to make something better of our shared world, socialist politics, broadly conceived, offer us the best tools we have for getting there.
Adapted from The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Copyright © 2019 by Bhaskar Sunkara. Available now from Basic Books
Capital seeks to infinitely expand, but the material world – both human labor and the material environment – has finite limits